Mission Accomplished

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (8 vols. Index to come)--Roy P. Basler, Editor--($115).

This week's Lincoln book is 4,452 pages long and most of it is written by Abraham Lincoln himself. The first jotting is a rhyme probably not original with the teen-age writer:

Abraham Lincoln

his hand and pen

he will be good but

god knows When

The last entry is an engagement note: "Allow Mr. Ashmum & friend to come in at 9 a.m. tomorrow. A. Lincoln." It was an engagement the President never kept, for the note was signed at 8:30 p.m. on April 14, 1865, minutes before he left the White House for Ford's Theater, where John Wilkes Booth waited.

Between the first and last Lincoln autographs, there were thousands of letters, speeches, business notes and miscellaneous jottings. In 1924 a group of Lincoln enthusiasts known as the Abraham Lincoln Association dedicated themselves to the staggering task of tracing down every scrap. Now with the publication of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (in 3.300 sets--1,000 sold before publication), they consider the job 99% complete. The missing 1%: items owned by holdouts who refuse to cooperate, a few papers that have turned up since the work was printed and whatever (perhaps) may turn up in the future. Satisfied that their 20-year mission is accomplished the Abraham Lincoln Association* has disbanded.

Hundreds of Lincoln entries are of only trifling interest, even to historians. Taken together, the eight volumes show little of the intellectual curiosity and range of the writings of Thomas Jefferson (six volumes published, 46 to come). But the character which builds in them, especially during the later years, is more impressive than anything the legendmakers have been able to fashion. The native wit, the humility, the triumphant common sense are as abundant as the 5,000-odd books about him claim they were.

* Whose onetime executive secretary Benjamin P. Thomas, wrote Abraham Lincoln (TIME. Nov. 10), the best one-volume biography available.

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